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Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Naming of mithuns in Apatani are based on the patterns of colours on their skin. Male and female with similar pattern of colours may have different names. Male names generally start with ‘ta’ as starting syllable and that of female with ‘ya’ as starting syllable. However, there are some patterns of colour for which the bearer have a name irrespective their gender. Following are the illustrations of some common names:

**[e may be replaced by e for convenience of writing and typing and its use in words are understood from context.]

Apatani being a tone language, all the speech sounds mentioned above except e have variant forms depending on length, pitch and aspiration of the vowel. These variant forms are represented in words with certain combination of letters which are nearest to the sound represented in English words with similar combinations of letters.

Representation of speech sounds on basis of length, pitch and aspiration:

Variants of vowel sound a:a /as in Papa, ask/ e.g, apu (flower), owpa (about to cut work with spade), ane (mother)aa/as in aag (fire), raat (night) in hindi/ e.g, aane (came), owpaa (remove by cutting with spade)ah/as in ah!/ e.g, miinah (too busy in doing something), owpah (chance of working with spade/ chance to find something while working with spade)